theairlock | week 6

Entry tags:

!round 2,
!week 6

week 6

[Even with three deaths two weeks in a row, life in the Fantasy Sweet returns to some semblance of normalcy come Sunday morning. The messes are cleaned up, the bodies are safe in the morgue (or in Kip's case, still in a liquor bottle in the garden) and with this new week comes a fresh crop of returning memories.

There is no new floor this week.

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday

[ooc: Don't forget to to turn in your activity for week 5, submit your memory regains and put in your threads for the Benefactors!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's not so much that, it's...I mean a little bit. I don't uh. Wwwwant to ruin your mood.

Y'know, more than usual.

It's kinda sentimental?

My mood is in a constant state of 'ruined', in case you'd not noticed. And the more defensive you get, the more I wonder what you're actually up to.

Okay. Um. Preface. I don't really know Latin, annnnnd Clarith and I aren't, uhhhhhhhh. Seeing eye to eye right now?

What the hell is Latin-

[record scratch]

[....ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh my god(s)]

That is the most absurdly sentimental thing I have ever heard.

[HEY YOU KNOW THAT HOOD HE PROPPED BACK UP HE'S PULLING IT BACK DOWN NOW. HE HAS NO FACE. HE IS BIRB NOW. SQUAWK.]

Don't make it worse.

['don't make it worse', he said to chancellor ardyn izunia, who spent two thousand years making everything worse]

Oh, but it's so very funny that you would try to figure that out phonetically because you knew I would mock you to one end of the mansion and back if you asked outright.

As I am doing right now.

I didn't wanna ruin the moment and ask you then, and since you sorta...it was a, y'know, a symbolic sort of letting go of--I didn't want to ask you now either!

I have done nothing wrong in my life, ever, to deserve this derision. [He says, still trying to disappear into the kigurumi.]

Ruining the moment, that's even more foolishly sentimental.

[sorry church. he's laughing at you now.]

You are completely unbelievable.

Ffffff, oh my god. This is why I didn't want to answer you about what I was writing. [How far into...or even off of this chair can Church sink? Let's find out!]

Stop whining and give me that pen.

Nnnnnnnooooooooo.

[Okay but fine he flops a hand on the table and hands over the pen.

...And realizes hey maybe he also needs uh. paper. to write on. Hold on. There is some shifting going on in that kigu. And eventually a hand pops out where the face would be, so, like, it looks like some vaguely horrifying thing where a black cartoon chocobo has eaten a man alive. Slaps down the paper, crinkled. The blank side up, thanks. Don't uh...don't try to read his attempts at deciphering sung Latin.]

You really are ridiculous.

[Ardyn said that with a quiet laugh as he started writing in the usual neat script, following with:]

I can't believe you're actually wearing that, either.

Blue's my color, but I was...feeling...

[mumblegrumblethisistheworst] sentimental.

Also I kept getting told they're cozy as shit, so I was bound to put one of them on eventually.

So you've said. Loudly, I might add.

[He clearly had not forgotten the deafening friendship speech. A moment later, he set down the pen and handed the paper back to Church.]

There. All you needed to do was ask.

[It takes him a moment, but he actually wiggles back up into the seat properly and peeks through the hood and takes it.

And reads it.

And jesus lucian christ it's about as feels-inducing as he figured it was just listening to it. Nope. Not gonna get choked up reading stupid-ass Latin-that-isn't-called-Latin. Nuh-uh. From this angle, it's hard to see his face as it is still, and that's for the best. Give him a moment.

Aaaand okay go, game face on.]

Yeah, well, I didn't know that because the whole thing seemed pretty final and I was trying to be a good boy and not bother you with it. I was gonna ask Clarith. She's nnnnot in the mood to deal with people. Or with anything. I think.

I got some of the words, anyway. Better than nothing.

I doubt she and I are on the most amicable terms right now as well. [Ardyn shrugged, picking up the pen again and twirling it between his fingers.]

I'm sure you came reasonably close. Regardless, now you have it done accurately.

[He's not going to dig his hole deeper by explaining how close he may or may not have gotten.]

You too, huh? Yeah like...sometimes I think I get it, but then she insists that I don't, and then she has to go and slap me? Not a big fan of that. I mean maybe if I'm in bed with someone we can talk slapping, but in general?

Just thought maybe she was gonna be the last person I'd have a shouting match with is all. Or Arianna.

...You, too? I'd almost be proud of her having a spine if it hadn't come with proving she clearly doesn't.

[ardyn, please.]

Oh man, she slapped you? Listen, that alone is ballsy. ...Though, I mean, I guess you're really getting it from the ladies now. [Ardyn and Queenie were not exactly in a private area, all right.]

She's got an assload of trauma that's shaped her, and it's like she doesn't think anyone sees that when we try to help her change her way of thinking about it. It's dumb. She's dumb. We're all fucking dumb and traumatized and fucked up even if we don't know it yet, or even if we weren't, we're in this fucking place, so we are now.

[Throws up his fuzzy cozy arms! Fuck this place.] Anyway I don't think she buys she's the like...anti-you.

... [Ardyn's free hand briefly came up to his face where he'd been slapped twice now. More than he'd expected, less than he probably deserved.]

It irritates me to no end. She's so convinced that her only value is in what she can do for others, as though her life has no meaning past being used to her last breath and discarded. And she won't listen when I tell her what that is going to end in.

[The pen abruptly stopped twirling, Ardyn's hand curling around it like the hilt of a dagger.]

...I look at her, and I see exactly the same qualities you do. Sacrificing all that she has for a world that treats her like she's worthless, refusing to simply be even the faintest bit selfish. 'As long as I'm the one suffering instead of someone else, it's fine.' 'If I was able to help even one person, it doesn't matter what happens to me.'

[The pen was laid on the table a little too harshly underneath Ardyn's left hand; it was that or stab it right into the surface.]

It's sickening.

[He's gonna watch that with a little bit of a raised brow. Those are some increasingly intense feels there, Ardy. He can't possibly imagine why.]

Is it...is it weird that she seems selfish in her selflessness? Whatever you say to her, in one ear out the other, and it always ends up being about her, somehow? Every time. Like every conversation seems pretty well focused on her for her not giving a shit about herself. She's got a complex we guys in the military like to call survivor's guilt and post-traumatic stress, and she doesn't want any help for that. [church everyone calls them that that's what they are] She just wants to hate herself and listen to everyone else's crap and feel even worse about herself until she kills herself or dies.

...I might still be kind of angry with her. And fucking perplexed.

Anyway. Yeah. It's sickening. Especially to you. [Just...gonna...reach his hand out to place over Ardyn's.] Not every story that's similar is going to end the same way.

[Ardyn let out a slow breath, making some sort of effort to keep his temper in check.]

I'm furious with her--she's a worse lost cause than I ever was, and refuses to even try to be anything else.

If it does end like that, it'll be her own fault for not listening to someone who actually knows better.

You're both brick walls.

She said she needed more time. And...fuck it, who am I to tell her how she does or doesn't deal with her shit. At least she got to know before experiencing it. She had a damn autobiography. Her life's literally an open book; she actually let people read it.

Experiencing it first hand is different, but I just...don't know how to get her to let for for two seconds and have a good time. I don't think even I could make her laugh. Smile, yeah, but not laugh. I even suggested she make a blanket fort, Ardy. Who doesn't love a blanket fort? Even you'd think it was a quaint waste of time, key word being quaint.

So I'm not what she needs. [Nobody needs me!] You might be, but she has to let it, and she's just not ready for that, I guess.

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